And yet, reporting and blogging is what he's been doing since he joined ThinkProgress in 2005, so Shakir's skillset tends in that direction. Fortunately for Shakir and his ilk, it's a skillset valuable not just to news organizations but to the people who spin them. "Taking over Shakir's role at Think Progress will be Judd Legum, who founded the blog before leaving to serve as research director for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign and then run for state office," Stein reports. So as you can see, there's already something of a revolving-door policy with the Democratic party.

Update (5:36 p.m. EDT): Shakir took some umbrage at our characterization of his and Think Progress's left-leaning point of view as "bias." He wrote in an email:

ThinkProgress’ mission is to provide fair, honest, and accurate progressive journalism. We cover the issues that we care deeply about, and we are not hiding the fact that we have a point of view. But that point of view, or “bias” as you call it, doesn’t mean that we are inherently incapable of doing honest journalism. I think our record has shown we can.

As to the notion of a revolving door policy between the left-leaning Center for American Progress and the Democratic party, that wasn't meant as a slight. But Shakir wanted to put it in context:

Tony Snow famously worked for Fox before joining the Bush White House. Conservative journalists like Amanda Carpenter and Michael Goldfarb have also done it. The insight of having worked in both worlds is unique, I think, but not one that only pertains to “the Democratic party.”